Happiness: Classic and Contemporary Readings in Philosophy

Bought for an ethics philosophy class. The book itself discussed the meaning of happiness via various classical and modern philosophers. Very good collection of essays with depth and insight on what we define as happiness.

Shipped fast and a very good deal. Great book for all your philosophy needs and would also be a good read despite being a textbook.

This is a lazily assembled packet of readings, done by lazy editors for lazy professors and lazy students, and published by a greedy and grasping Press.First, the only editorial contributions are a three-paragraph Preface and extremely terse one-paragraph comments at the beginning of each of the readings. Even the Introduction is repurposed from another book (by the same publisher). It is by a psychologist, who, not entirely unexpectedly, makes a mess out of sorting out crucial definitions and distinctions. One would have thought that the philosopher-editors could have taken the trouble to provide their anthology with a proper, philosophically competent introduction: but no.Secondly, there are no editorial footnotes in any of the selections explaining obscure terms or ideas, or providing supplementary information. All footnotes are from the original authors. Given that almost of all the "Contemporary Sources" were directed at scholarly readers (having mostly appeared in scholarly journals), the uninitiated reader will often be at a loss to make out what subtle point is being made.The problem with footnotes is especially egregious in the case of the contribution of one of the editors, Christina Vitrano, whose article refers to other articles in this very anthology. However, instead of referring to pages in the anthology, she prefers to cite the places where these articles originally appeared! A student of hers could have done the work of collating the articles - but maybe they were lazy too.Thirdly, there are no aids to understanding such as Reading Questions or Questions for further reflection.Fourthly, there is no General Bibliography or Guide to Further Reading.Fifthly, there is no Index.So the only job undertaken by the editors (yes, it took two of them!) was to select and excerpt the readings.Oxford University Press then slapped them together and listed the book for $35.95.

I chose this rating because the content is great. Although it's for a class (and we're not going to finish all of it), it has some great literature if you're into the subject matter.The only thing I didn't like about it is that it's hard to read. However, that comes with the territory. I would recommend that something like this would come with a companion text or some sort of dumb down some of its literature. It takes a person who studies these types of texts to divulge into its arguments.